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Vert.x is a fairly new project that has already reached 1.0 status and has a growing community. According to their website Vert.x is: Effortless asynchronous application development for the modern web and enterprise. If your familiar with Node.js then you will most likely feel right at home with Vert.x. Vert.x also allows you to use a favorite language like Java, Ruby, Groovy, or JavaScript with support for Scala and Python coming in the future. Today I’ll go over a very simple demo on how to try out Vert.x using Java.

Vert.x currently uses Apache Ant and I was curious to start using Vert.x but without having to setup Ant, etc. What follows are the steps I took to get the WebSockets example working on my OS X machine without using Ant.

First off, you need Java JDK 1.7 installed and that means if your on OS X then you need to be running Lion 10.7.2+. See my previous post on how to install the JDK 1.7 on OS X.

At some point it looks like the Vert.x artifacts will be on Maven Central, but until then you can download the binaries here. Once you’ve extracted the files to a convenient location on your hard drive set your path to point to the Vert.x bin folder. My .bash_profile file looks like this in my case:

export PATH=/Users/chad3925/vert.x-1.0.final/bin:$PATH

From the Terminal you should be able to then run the following command:

Grab a copy of the ws.html file from the GitHub repo and save it to where you plan to keep your resulting compiled binaries.

I used Netbeans 7.1 to create a new Maven application called WebsocketsExample and then manually brought in the dependancies (since they are not yet on Central when this article was written). My pom.xml looks like this: